Your Brain Can Remember Passwords Just Fine

The best passwords are long and have random words (along with a number, capital letter, and symbol worked in there). The idea isn’t that hackers won’t be able to crack your passphrase; it’s that they’ll be long dead by the time they’re able to. If you need help coming up with a password, Micah Lee from The Intercept has a neat trick to help you craft one that will take a hacker an average of 27 million years to break.

You may be thinking that it’s impossible to make room in that busy brain of yours to remember such a hodge-podge of random words. Well, I see your unfounded excuse and raise you a scientific study that says otherwise. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Motherboard writes that “two researchers asked a group of volunteers to log into a website 90 times over the span of 10 days, using whatever password the volunteers chose.” After entering their password, participants were asked to enter a “security code made of either four random letters or two random words.”

Over the course of the 10-day experiment, more letters and words were added to the code until participants had either somewhere up to 12 random letters or six random words in their security code. Each day the security code would be on a longer delay, prompting participants to recall it and enter in what they already knew.

The researchers found that 94 percent of participants were able to remember their random security code or phrase that consisted of things like “jkgbdaplloqr” or “corgi laugh raid neon tree.”

The trouble most people have is coming up with such a random string of words. Most of our passphrases are based in pop culture or memories, which makes them easy to guess. Not to mention people still fall back on the “12345” passwords because they’re easy and guaranteed to be remembered. But it seems that the research would suggest with a little creativity and some patience, you can train your brain to remember a convoluted password. It’s designed to make room for that kind of stuff after all.